[mcpa4321]

I have read of people moving from Accounting to IT, but what about people moving from IT to Accounting? I know a lot of accounting/CPA firms can use people with IT skills. Certainly I would be willing to bring those skills to the table.

I obtained a BS in IT from a very unknown state college in 2009 with a B grade GPA. Despite this, after some brief contract part time jobs, I was able to save up my money and relocate to a major metro area and obtain a full time tech support job in 2010. It was my goal to eventually obtain a security clearance and move up the ladder in IT in government or government contractor.

However that job ended in 2013. A subsequent tech support job gave me more insight into the tech support field in a large company. I realized based on this experience that I was interested in moving to a job or career in which I could do something more quantitative in nature, so I began taking accounting courses at a local community college that would count towards becoming a CPA. I unfortunately have had to take a part time job in an unrelated field.

I am now at the point where if I take one more accounting class I can meet the educational requirements for my state. I have enjoyed the classes. I have also enrolled in a part time MBA program at a non-Top 20 but still name-recognizable private non-online college and am trying to decide whether to do the Finance (moving towards finance or accounting specialization) or Information Systems specialization (staying in IT). But I am still not sure whether it is worth it to go ahead and move into accounting. Is it? I have read that accounting is becoming more IT oriented, off shored, and automated on blogs like goingconcern and that a CPA license is not even as necessary these days. I have seen how automation and off shoring has affected IT.

[Last Chance CPA]

I am in IT, have an MBA, and completed the CPA exams. So far, it has been a challenge to get anyone to recognize me in the accounting world. I have over 12 years of IT consulting experience. I don't want to be a traditional accountant, but would rather combine the two into an IT Audit or ERP Implementations role. I don't think accounting will ever be off-shored at the same level as IT development. I think IT/CPA is a great combo, but right now I am a bit frustrated. I need to go out and network, and you will have to do the same. It also sounds like you will be willing to go in entry-level, whereas I am already mid-career…

FAR - 76
AUD - 75
BEC - 75
REG - 76

Now I need some experience!!! And some networking...

[Anonymous]

If you want a IT-heavier focus where the accounting knowledge could be very useful, one idea would be accounting-specific IT support. I don't know exactly what this is called, but I'll describe what I've seen it as at my current employer and at my prior employer. 🙂 At my prior employer, it was a large international company (serviced over half of the Fortune 100 companies) that had 2 different accounting systems in use within the company, which were both also integrated with the production systems to pull production data into the accounting systems. Each accounting system had a team of IT people who specifically worked with that specific program. If they'd left the job with our company, they would've looked for another job specifically with that program at a different company. At that employer, these IT folks knew nothing about accounting and weren't able to interpret what we needed into how they could provide it.

At my current employer, I'm in higher ed, and we have an ERP system which is used for all of our accounting as well as a lot of other functions on campus (grades are entered through it; Student Life tracks room assignments through it; Safety can track tickets through it; Admissions tracks prospective students through it; etc.). Here we call our ERP-system-specific-IT-people the “Administrative Systems” department, not sure if that's a standard title for such a group or not. However, these folks are awesome. To my knowledge neither of them have any formal accounting training, but they've soaked up what they've heard from us over the years, so I can tell them I need a report to pull a special balance sheet for a sub-fund and talk in half-accounting-ease and they can figure out how to get it into SQL and get a report for me. I understand some basic report writing and basics of how databases store info, etc., so between their basic understanding of accounting and my basic understanding of computers, we can communicate pretty well and almost always get new projects without too many issues. 🙂

So, all that to say, if you want something that uses your accounting knowledge but builds on your IT experience, something in “IT dedicated to supporting accountants” might be a good combo. I'm just not sure what it's called, unless Administrative System is the correct title elsewhere as well.

More generally speaking, I have a subscription to FlexJobs since I'm interested in working remotely in the future. FlexJobs is a paid job search service, which I know is a little unique, but I frequently see postings in the Accounting & Finance category that require IT experience. They're usually working for software companies developing or customizing software for accounting purposes (like Oracle and companies like that). If you're interested in remote work, it might be worth the $5 to get a one-month subscription and look around the site to see if there's stuff that might be of interest to you. It's $15 per month, but if you Google, you at least used to be able to find a coupon code to make it $5 a month for the first month. WIthout a subscription, you can view shortened job postings without the employer name, but not enough to know for sure if oyu'd qualify or apply.

….and to really answer the OP, I haven't seen many (any?) job postings for an IT/accounting hybrid jobs that would require the CPA designation. I'd think the main or only reason for getting it would be to have something on your resume showing you have accounting background of one sort or another. If you want to go into accounting primarily, then it would be good, but for hybrid it probably wouldn't be necessary. However, it seems like the hybrid jobs are primarily IT, with just a bit of accounting thrown in. If you want to be mostly accounting, it seems like it will have to be almost all accounting, just getting to help your coworkers out with Excel when they get stuck or install a printer for them or something like that (which I do for mine haha).

[ocarina]

Hello!

I'm totally aware of how to combine IT and accounting. I personally have a CPA and Accounting degree but have an IT/financial background. I DO NOT want to do tax or financial audit so I went down the best road I could, IT audit & consulting at a regional CPA firm. It's been a great choice as it lays a foundation for me to eventually go into IT management/security/specialize in consulting of some kind. It's also keeping the CPA useful since I'm supporting the financial statements on a lot of my engagements, just on the IT side of things. I will be working on other certifications as I am currently to enhance my security/technical knowledge. I really enjoy my job! (Probably lots of luck in that regard, but I am happy I found this niche)

FAR - 78
AUD - 82
REG - 79
BEC - 78

Study Materials: Becker Self Study, NINJA Notes, NINJA MCQ for review
Started March 2015 and finished December 2015 all on first attempt. Licensed CPA Jan 2016.

IT Auditor/CyberSec Consultant in Public Accounting
Future goals: Learn IT Network infrastructure, obtain CISA & CISSP

[mcpa4321]

Thank you for the replies thus far. I wish to point out as well that I am primarily interested in becoming a traditional accountant, so please give me information on whether that is a good field to go into. Audit, tax are very appealing to me. The remaining class I have is for management accounting, and it sounds very interesting. I like dealing with the numbers and interacting with (especially advising) people. Yes, I would be willing to contribute my IT skills and knowledge, but only if my coworkers or supervisors would want me to or allow it. I am mainly interested in accounting.

Also would it look okay enough to have just a regular MBA or should the MBA in Finance? (The school had an Accounting specialization but phased it out.)

[Anonymous]

I guess we'd have to know what you mean by “whether that is a good field to go into”. Obviously all of us are in it. 🙂 I enjoy being in it, for whatever that is worth. You'll enter at the bottom, as your experience in IT won't really count for anything in accounting. However, that's true with switching from audit to tax or vice-versa, too, so it's not that accounting thinks it's superior to all, just that audit vs tax vs IT are different fields and experience in one won't help much in the other. You seem pretty reasonable, though, so sounds like you understand that. 🙂

If you have some specific questions or concerns about making the switch, we could probably help address those, but I'm not good at answering a blanket question of “is it a good field”.

Biggest drawback to accounting (in my experience) is that accounting generally has long hours, but some jobs don't or not as bad, and most accounting jobs the longest hours are confined to a certain time on the calendar (either in private accounting to a portion of the month/quarter, or in public to a couple portions of the year).

Best benefit of accounting is that it does have a pretty solid job market. A lot more small companies have accountants than a dedicated IT staff, for example. Is there a thread of automation? To an extent, but not fully. The traditional stereotypical accounting work is becoming more and more automated – the taking an individual receipt, making an individual entry, individual filing it away and tracking it through record retention for years, etc. However, the higher level thinking required for accounting will take a long time to be replaced if it ever is. I like the fact that the mundane part of the job isn't going to be as needed, but the more analytical side is just going to be more and more necessary as people want more complex predictions and analysis. Personally, I like the problem-solving more than the record-keeping, so if I can (for example) export a listing of all our credit card transactions after the cardholders have assigned account numbers to them, and just briefly review for accuracy then import into the accounting system, that sounds a whole lot better to me than going through a huge stack of receipts, coding for accounts, and then typing one-by-one into the accounting system. That's the type of changes that are being made. They're awesome, they are affecting the accounting clerk level jobs and will continue to do so, but I don't see the higher-level accounting jobs going anywhere anytime soon.

For your MBA, I would look around and see if you could get a Bachelor's in Accounting with the Accounting courses you've taken already (one option would be to see if between the courses you've taken in accounting and the classes you've taken elsewhere you could transfer everything to Thomas Edison State University [formerly College – name changed a week or so ago] and get a degree there: https://www.tesu.edu/business/bsba/Accounting.cfm . I got my degree though TESC/TESU and only took 1 course actually through TESC, so could be an easy way to formalize your credits into a degree). If so, then you'd already have Accounting in your education on your resume, and a general MBA would be fine. If you wouldn't have an easy way to do that (it's definitely not worth taking lots of extra classes!), then getting the MBA in Finance would just show that while you were doing your MBA, you were preparing for the move to an accounting/finance career and weren't still thinking IT-focused. Is the Finance track necessary? Probably not, but I think it would help, and definitely wouldn't hurt.

Also, just a thought to throw out there – have you considered a Finance career? I think your IT skills would be more likely to be a boost to your resume in Finance than Accounting. Not for a hybrid career, but for a pure Finance job, since they do a lot more with financial modeling and such, it seems like Finance jobs often have preferred qualifications that include IT abilities. If you haven't looked into Finance much, then it'd be worth considering at least. However, Accounting is good too. 🙂 I didn't really understand what Finance was when I was in school, so did Accounting cause I thought it was about the same and the degree was easier. Now, I think I'd enjoy the Finance work more, but it's a bit more specialized so the jobs aren't as abundant in rural areas, so since I live in the middle of nowhere, I'm glad that I went into Accounting instead. Even people in the backhills have to file taxes. 😉

[taxsage]

With about three years of experience in tech and not being able to land a tech job; I would say your in a position to change careers without giving up much.

That being said I think a technology to an accounting career change is not a clear cut choice like retail to accounting. Not many people fall in love with accounting, and not all CPAs are guaranteed to do great things.

Accounting, like tech, is a good middle class career choice. If you have a stable personality then you can expect a stable career. Both jobs can be effected by the economy, but R&D type tech jobs can have drastic swings.

I imagine that accounting is only more exciting than those calll center type tech jobs.

If i were you Instead of taking a 20 to 30k college loan I would take a 5k loan and move to the Bay Area and stay in tech. Take some accounting classes on the side at a community college.

[Author]

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